Writing Your Life: Putting Your Past on Paper

By Lou Willett Stanek

We all have stories to tell -- of a rapturous first kiss, a life-altering moment of choice, or the shocking revelation of a long-guarded secret. And these stories are often as distinctive, fascinating, exciting and entertaining as those found in the memoirs and autobiographies that currently top the nation's bestseller lists. We just need to know how to tell them best.

Veteran, writing teacher, lecturer, and author of So You Want to Write a Novel, Lou Willet Stanek can help you translate your joys and ordeals, thoughts and triumphs into superbly crafted nonfiction -- taking you step-by-step through the writing process with care, encouragement, and expert advice. She shows you how to unlock your memories, create settings and scenes, protray major characters and dramatic events. And she offers the key to finding your own unique voice, and to presenting your greatest charcter -- yourself -- without boring your reader or sounding egotistical.

Complete with invaluable exercises, nuts-and-bolts techniques, and motivational tools, Writing Your Life is indispensible for every aspiring writer who wishes to mine the rich lode of his or her past for all the gems hidden there.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9780062267696

Book preview

Introduction

Recently I went back to the white clapboard house, square as a box of paper napkins, the place with the uneven sidewalk where, on brand-new ball-bearing roller skates, I broke my arm as soon as my father turned loose of my hand. We moved there from the farm when I was six, but I flew away from southern Illinois long ago. I doubt the house is still there.

I wanted to fly even before I realized I had to write. Swooping down from the low limb of a cherry tree any tomboy could climb, I made my first flight with a kitchen-curtain cape streaming from Wonder Woman’s narrow shoulders. In the spring the fruit tree’s limbs, lush with leaves and sweet-smelling blossoms, provided an umbrella to protect me from reality, while Mother and the boxy house’s back door were close enough for comfort.

Anyone who physically and emotionally outlasts childhood has something to write about forever. After many successful flights. Wonder Woman crashed on her nose. Next a frisky horse darted under a low limb. Then it was a deep dive into the shallow end of the swimming pool. By twenty, I had a beak like a parrot. Not even the domestic airlines were interested in having a stewardess with a profile problem, not even Wonder Woman.

Before imposing, passenger-packed jets, when flying was still considered glamorous, the competition for a stewardess position was ferocious. The year I applied, the probability numbers were about as chilling as for the first unsolicited novel I submitted to an editor. Trying to let me down easy, the smooth airline recruiter with ersatz charm, a slick gray suit that looked as if it had been scaled off a fish, and a what’s-a-guy-to-do expression told me they had received 5,280 applications for 300 slots in stew classes. Rejection is not an acquired taste. When you’re young, it’s a killer. With his eye on my tears, his watch, and the next flight out of town, the recruiter, displaying effete sympathy, also told me about surgery that could fix my nose.

Even on a bad day, writing is more fun than having a nose job, but not as good for one’s self-esteem as flying was in what Galway Kinnel recalls as the heyday of stewardesses when flight attendants had a virginal alertness. The wings on the crisp uniform liberated me, allowing me to fly over the confining cornfields and conservatism of my childhood. Or at least, that’s the way I remember it.

Writers weave myths out of memory. The surgery might not have been as ghastly as I recall. My mother might not have been as concerned, my father as horrified, when I called them…after the deed was done. At least my father paid the bill, if grimly. I’m sure of that.

Seasoned by time, remembrances change shape and color. With a little help from our imaginations, desires, and experiences, we have the power and the privilege to invent the truth. Malleable memory, not magic, turns people, events, and things into symbols. We reconstruct our pasts in tune with our heart’s desires to become the heroes of our own myths.

Most of my University of Chicago colleagues found my flying career amusing and gallantly forgave me for my frivolous lapse. Frivolous? Who safely evacuated fifty-six passengers from an emergency landing in a field? Who held Willy Mays’s hand on landing and takeoff, calmed his fear of flying? I remember having serious discussions with people like Robert Oppenheimer, reading Joyce at his tower in Dublin, writing a master’s paper on The Fairie Queen after flying a back-to-back night trip. Pitying my associates their missed opportunities for daring adventures, I pardoned their stuffiness.

We often accuse others of the shadows in ourselves.

Someone wise said language has double power to create and exorcise. I find a third dimension: to escape. I began to work on this book the week I bought a hundred-year-old neglected cottage on an island in Maine. Arriving in July after a long, hot drive from New York, I waded through weeds to my waist, opened the door, and screamed. During the winter, rapacious raccoons had exercised their squatter’s rights. The water pipes and the toilets had burst. The wind and sea had dumped debris, maybe bats, through a broken window. The local paper said the night before, a boy had found a possum in his bed.

Who wanted to be there? I didn’t want to be there. For this trip I did not need a plane, however. I turned on my computer and went back to southern Illinois, to the square white house where I lived when I was six, when the livin’ was easy. Or at least, that’s the way I remember it.

But when writing about our history, the tense is always past imperfect. There is no way to regain the bulletproof vest of innocence we wore back then.

Eventually, when the experience is not so raw, I’ll write about the Maine cottage. My mother would smile if she knew I had escaped…back home. She maintained I had begun to try to get away when I learned to crawl. My father thought the world quit at our county line, and he did not trust airplanes. When Mother told him I was going to fly, he asked her how she could let me go. Translator was her role in the family. Because I want to keep her, my wise mother replied. Memories tie you to where you came from even if it’s not the place you had in mind.

Before I had seen Barcelona or lived long enough to have much to recall, I made up sensational stories set in faraway places, casting myself in the lead as rodeo queen, foreign correspondent, test pilot, bareback rider in the circus. On my mighty steed, Prince, I, Belle Starr, led the Younger Gang into scandalous mischief all over our pasture.

At school I was always in trouble. Some eight-year-old tattletale in training to be a sycophant invariably told on me. Hidden behind the kind of desk whose top pulled up like a shield, I wrote down the spectacular tales I made up and, God forbid, read stories. I think I became a writer out of pure stubbornness. I loved to read, and someone was always saying I couldn’t or shouldn’t or I was going to ruin my eyes. I still feel guilty reading for pleasure during the day. It’s like having a drink before five.

I live in Manhattan now, go to Maine in the summer, and spend all of my time reading, writing, and teaching. I wrote the script in southern Illinois a long time ago. It could be a figment of my imagination.

For several years I’ve taught fiction writing classes where my students and I play a pleasurable game of pretend. With nary a twinkle in anyone’s eye, we make believe the characters and events in everyone’s story are imaginary. There’s the sensitive ironworker with a degree in English whose responsive character is fighting for union control of…the ironworkers. The restless lawyer has created an ambitious protagonist who comes to realize life has more to offer than winning a court case. The gay man, who at the time didn’t know how to say he was sorry, has written a moving story about a homosexual who is able to explain to his wife and kids why the honest way is the better way.

I’ve decided to go straight.

Not everyone can invent a plot convincing us Anna Karenina would have jumped in front of a moving train, and you might not be ready to confess as Saint Augustine did in the fourth century before news spread like the seven-year itch, but we all have a plethora of stories. Finding the words to tell what has happened and how you feel about it is the way we come to understand why the world is what it is and why things happen as they do.

So many memorable things have already happened, most of us with other jobs and unfinished lives do not have time to start in the beginning and work our way through the thicket of family, friends, career, etc., as autobiographers tend to do. Although a memoir and an autobiography are kissing cousins, the similarities can be slight.

Most autobiographies tend to spread all over your life, like a runny batter, while a memoir can be neat, tidy, and much easier to handle and contain. Imagine your life rolled out in one huge piece of dough, but what interests you at the moment is your ghastly thirteenth summer, that year when you didn’t feel as if you fitted into anyone’s niche. Cut out that one piece and roll the rest up for another day. Working with a small bit of your past makes it easier to keep focused.

Perhaps you will collect a potpourri of remembrance for your own pleasure, or give it to someone as a present, or send one to a magazine, or quarterly. While you are telling time, you might even find a book tucked in there with all the mishmash.

The personal memories I will share with you in search of your own are the truth, or at least the way I remember them.

Writing from memory allows you to time-travel, to zoom back to people and places you have not seen in years. Buckle your seat belt. This trip could be the exhilarating escapade you’ve been itching for. Learning to see when you have moved too near to Narcissus’s pool, you will show how you have learned from the highs and lows, changed and grown. Prepare for having fun in the process.

BREAKING THE ICE

FOLLOWING THE RULES OF THE WRITER’S ROAD

Chapter 1

You Learn to Write by Writing

The magic words for fiction writers are what if…; for memoir writers, I remember… breaks the ice.

Without memory, time has no meaning.

You have had an interesting, distinctive life, but who will know? Think about your heirs. Family history ranks high as a legacy. My intention in Writing Your Life is to help you sort out the jumble of pain, pleasure, accomplishments, and regrets you have accumulated. You know what happened. The book will encourage you to write to explore what it means, to tell others, and to enjoy this adventure-some and mysterious journey into your past.

If you were to write an autobiography, you would have to spend a lot of time at the courthouse, looking up the date your great-grandfather was born, what year your father bought the house on Elm Street. The research for a memoir can be done in an easy chair. Close your eyes and try to recapture the moment you bought your first car, learned you were pregnant, met the president, or wobbled down the street on a two-wheeler. I am sure you can recall initiation night, the first time you spoke in public, or the first time you said, I love you.

You do not have to have been a young man in Paris to have had a life that is a moveable feast.

Remember the first time you lied to your father and he knew, or how silly you felt when she took that photograph of you riding a sulky elephant in India? Who but you knows how hellish it was to please a son of a gun with that much power? Your first kiss, of course, you will never forget, but don’t you wonder if he has? Was there ever a home with as many places to hide and pout as that house you moved into the summer you were eight? Everyone knows his account, but unless you write your version, who will know there was another side to the family squabble or office feud? Today you might even be brave enough to expose that pit bull of a kid who made first grade hideous. He never left Omaha, so he can’t get you, can he? And your daughter’s garden wedding when it rained; now, that was a day to be recorded.

All of us know we are different from anyone else, and if others only knew what we see, how we feel and think, they would understand and appreciate us more, for pity sakes. But until we find the language to express our view, we don’t always understand ourselves or the world we inhabit. For me writing is a necessity. I get twitchy and cranky until I wrestle those sensations into an image I can see, an idea that makes sense. I write to learn what I know and how I feel about it.

A fine artist and friend in Maine believes some responses defy spoken language and becomes impatient when I search for words to express how I feel about her work. So I wait until I leave the studio to begin my probe. The experience hasn’t happened, the gift she has given isn’t mine, until I can express it. Our ability to be moved by music, art, language, brings balance to a world crammed with crime, noise, bills, bureaucratic bother. I can’t bear to leave behind a sensation that offers a feeling of peace and brings order, no matter how briefly, to tumbling, stumbling, trials, and troubles.

Do you remember your reaction to the piece of sculpture you discovered, quite by accident, one foggy evening in a tiny Venice courtyard? You probably said, I’ll never forget this moment, I’ll never be the same. Yet, unless you put some phrases on paper, no matter how hard it is finding fresh words for your feelings, the passion probably escaped, leaving no trace. Practice will make it easier.

When something happens I want to share and remember, like the morning a bull moose strolled into my backyard on Bailey Island, the first version is usually a letter. Since my pen pal list would stretch from here to Peoria, I recycle the news, altering it only to fit the receiver. My noncritical sister and my friend Lucy Ann are most apt to receive a purple prose account drowning in adjectives, slashed with exclamation points. The next interpretation usually goes to Illinois to Jane, a dream of a friend for a writer and her publisher. She bought nineteen copies of my last book. I do a translation trying understatement, irony, for Jane, who wants to be remembered for what she didn’t say. By the time I report to an editor, a gentleman caller I’m trying to impress, writers in my workshop, or my former husband (who writes like a pro), I’ve hopefully tamed the beast — in this case the bull moose and the prose. I sold the strolling moose tale to a newspaper sans even one exclamation point, but that critter is still in my notebook and settling into my storehouse of tales. Don’t be surprised if he charges into another story.

Eventually the moose tale will move into memory and change, of course. The letters and the news story telling who, what, where, and why were immediate reactions. Even though the islanders said there was something wrong with me and the moose when I tried to touch him and he let me, I haven’t yet learned much from the experience. In a few years, the incident will linger somewhere between myth and reality.